Robert McKinley, Senior Analyst/Editor
Robert McKinley is an analyst of the payments industry on a daily basis for 32 years covering payment cards and payment systems from both the business side and the consumer side. McKinley is the retired founder and chief executive of RAM Research, CardWeb and CardTrak. In his prior position, McKinley has participated in more than 10,000 documented news media interviews, testified as an expert witness in two separate $billion+ U.S. anti-trust trials, testified before the U.S. Congress, assisted the GAO with paymentsIMG_2006 (1).jpeg reports, chaired numerous business conferences and provided C-Suite opinion to a multitude of Fortune 500 companies. In retirement, he has continued developing and funding digital media assets as well as contributing payments related analysis/content to a broad list of online publishers, including CardFlash, CardTrak and CardData. McKinley is also a national certified mentor with the non-profit SCORE organization with a focus on assisting Fintech startups. www.robert-mckinley.com

American Express is juicing up its Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) Credit Card in August. With the enhanced product benefits, the new annual fee will increase from $65 to $95 effective August 11, 2015. The first year of Card Membership is free and $95 annually thereafter.

The worldwide wearable device market recorded its eighth consecutive quarter of steady growth in the first quarter of 2015 (1Q15). According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, vendors shipped a total of 11.4 million wearables in 1Q15, a 200.0% increase from the 3.8 million wearables shipped in 1Q14.

Starting this fall, MasterPass from MasterCard will provide a simple and secure online shopping experience for the Wayfair family of brands as well as within the mobile apps for Wayfair.com, AllModern, and Joss & Main.

Visa and Verifone announced a partnership that will enable merchants to offer their customers a more streamlined, secure purchase experience across digital and face-to-face commerce environments, often referred to as omni-channel commerce.

X-Cart, a global provider of hosted shopping cart services for eCommerce businesses has teamed with Coinzone, a leading Bitcoin payment solution provider dedicated to making it easy for European merchants and consumers to use and accept digital currencies.

The recent introduction of Samsung Pay and Android Pay as well as India and soon to be announced Brazil mobile payments is having a profound impact on mobile payments forecasts. CardData now expects global m-commerce will soar from $390 billion this year to $1071 billion in 2020.

Based on new regression analysis, based on non-parametric statistics, e-commerce is expected to top $3.6 trillion by 2020. Forecaster RAM Research now predicts global e-commerce will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.57%.